“Hello, everybody on the other side,” a voice booms. “Can you break through?” This is one of the recordings deployed in Dickie Beau’s new show Camera Lucida, which opens at the Barbican tonight (October 28 2014). It’s also a line that encapsulates something of the spirit of the piece. Camera Lucida uses Beau’s trademark technique […]
“I sometimes think the most dangerous words are ‘normal’ and ‘natural’,” Grayson Perry said this week in the first episode of his new Channel 4 series, Who Are You? During the programme, Perry interviewed and created portraits of four people whose lives have much to tell us about subjectivity – how we experience the business of […]
Just a quick update on a couple of pieces that ran this week. QX Magazine picked up my post from last weekend about the future of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and ran it as a spread in their latest edition. Happily, we were able to update it to include the news, which broke a couple of […]
The next five years will be crucial to the long-term fate of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the iconic south London pub and LGBTQ cabaret venue that is being sold to unidentified new owners. “I’ve got five years to get RVT turned around and made into a viable business, but for that to happen we […]
Sorry for being quiet on here lately – been a busy boy lately with my PhD starting, trips to Sitges with Duckie and Lisbon for Queer Lisboa film festival, and various other things going on. But here are details on a couple of recent pieces for the Guardian. The first was an interview with Neil […]
Neil Patrick Harris is a very interesting figure: a child star turned adult award-winner whose openness about being gay hasn’t hurt his mainstream success; in fact, he just played that ultimate outsider Hedwig on Broadway and Joe and Joan Six-Pack seem to love him all the more for it. In addition to his well-established love of musical theatre – which […]
This review of Pride, released today in the UK, appears in the October 2014 issue of Sight & Sound. I recently argued in the Guardian that LGBT cinema is currently undergoing something of a ‘backward turn’: an increasingly sizeable body of work has emerged over recent years comprising films that could be considered retrospective in […]
The BFI renewed its commitment to LGBT and queer film in March with the rebranding of the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival as BFI Flare. But LGBT film fans won’t have to wait for Flare 2015 for another sizeable crop of cinematic fun under the BFI banner: next month’s London Film Festival is positively bulging […]
An interview with the writer, director and performer John Cameron Mitchell, of Shortbus and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about the London debut of his club night Mattachine and more
At the end of Back to the Future, our hero crashes his time-travelling car into a building. It used to be a cinema but now it’s a church. That seems right. In a way, certain kinds of movie, including Back to the Future, are morphing into religions, offering us opportunities to be together and happy – though […]
